Fargo

The point is you are wasting not only your time, but everyones time, by adding, changing or removing features, based on a broken core game. Everything you add, this included, might be redundant once you fixed basic mechanics after a full wipe. And this is not just since today, but for a whole year now. It makes no sense to care about new players, but ignore inflation that especially affects new players. It is a joke to claim that materials are redundant while every single good is inflated since month... Everything you did against ganking didnt solve the cause of the issue, and becomes redundant the moment you achieve that. BR restrictions, everything you did to reduce 1st rate PBs becomes redundant once you reduced 1st rate production naturally. Etc. We might like a features that might not work with existent features, and even make an existent feature redundant. You are responsible to make everything that gets added to the game work. Could you confirm that? Then look at the game please. Im just working on a topic pointing out once again how you made crafting and local trade redundant, and how poorly this is designed. Dont you want us to help you engineering the most perfect game possible? Or what is the goal. Making a game that not everyone hates? Thats a pretty good description of current NA...

What you don't understand is what the reasons are for this... And that if you won't figure this out and improve the actual game, nothing you can do will be able to keep new players in the game.

Ofcourse, but it most likely wont be an exchange. Doubloons are no currency like reals are. Doubloons are more a material like teak logs. Port drop/trader loot vs. amount of reals earned results in a certain value of teak logs. But did players exchange teak logs for gold/reals? No, because everyone needs them to craft good ships. Even if you had more than enough, you would stockpile them. Just try to buy teak logs, or doubloons. Doubloons sell for 500+ reals currently. 4mio reals for a first rate just for doubloons. 100mio. gold. Ofcourse other than logs not everyone demands doubloons for large ships, but the majority probably does. When crafting an item consumes 5 different "currencies", over time 4/5 of those most likely loose value, unless the game is balanced perfectly. Without teak logs, you alteast are able to use different logs. Without doubloons/marks/permits, the production stops. Resources (so labor and reals) that cant be consumed anymore, inflate. Fixed exchange rates would balance it, but this would remove the purpose of having different currencies. What even is the purpose of doubloons, when they are earned in the same ways reals are earned? The point is, is nobody realising how stupid this is? How difficult this is to balance? That either labor is the limiting factor and all these extra currencies become "redundant", or labor becomes redundant? Well its just labor isnt it... No, make labor redundant and you can remove labor and all crafting from the game. Local markets aswell, that are all about trading labor. You could just make the admiralty sell ships for only doubloons or reals. If we want meaningful crafting and player trade, labor needs to be the limiting factor of prodution. When i sell my doubloons to the lone contract that buys 500 D's for 15 reals in gustavia, because i dont care, this isnt proof that exchange is happening. If exchange happened, there would be competition. When contracts asking for 300 and less reals are filled, probably because newer and unexperienced players not owning redundant amounts of reals yet dont know what theyre doing. Otherwise they would place sell contracts, test what D's sell for, and triple the profit. When lots of players would sell D's, there would be lots of sell contracts. Idk, maybe thats the case in neutral ports?!

When doubloons are supposed to be a currency, first of all let players place contracs in doubloons and reals...

Once again, labor must not be tradable! The production capacity of each person needs to be limited. That even if this guy is a dedicated trader, he cannot determine the value of doubloons. And that he wont ask a fair price if competition isnt forcing him to do so. Also that reals and the whole economy are probably redundant for you, so you just filled that contracte because you had enough doubloons you wont need... Just tell me what the price was, and we can test it.

What price? You seem to not understand how this works. The market isnt working based on honest people figuring out fair prices. Prices develop based on competition. No matter how experienced you are, you cant just figure out what a reasonable price is. When there are no contracts/competition, all you can do is set the first price very low/high. So you probably made a bad deal there. That there is zero competition on local markts has several reasons. From inflation (why sell something today thats worth 10% more tomorrow?), over contract fee (up to10% fee each time you need to adjust a contract price), to bad design (few professions allowing easy self supply, etc.). It was for example always about knowing the labor value in gold. You could find this out by looking at actual market prices, and see that e.g. ships usually sold for about 100 gold/LH. Then you could figure out what a reasonable price would be for every single labor based good. What was important when you tried to buy/sell something for that competition was very low, like materials, cannons or other ships. Otherwise you would pay the fee each time you need to adjust the price. What you could do constantly without contract fees to figure out when a good starts selling, or players start selling to you. Again doubloons are mainly a crafting material, not a currency. And because local trade has so many issues, people mostly supply themselfes, and stockpile materials. If you could buy the ship you need from the market for reals, you could sell your doubloons. But you cant, so people dont sell them. A major reason that you cant sell anything for profit is that people dont rely on your labor/goods, as long as they have labor contracts. When they dont like the market price, they can use labor contracts to craft it themselfes. And they can even trade the contracts to their friend if they arent a shipbuilder themselfes. So prices drop until it becomes impossible to sell anything with any margin. The effect of labor inflation caused by labor contracts, that didnt get wiped.

Havent seen this yet. Hundreds to thousands also isnt much. When just a few players want to buy doubloons for the next 1-2 ships, we are talking about 100k demand already. The point is that players still own the inflated gold/reals. Why should they sell any valuable materials for reals. And doubloons are as much a currency as teak logs are. Both is mainly a crafting material. Why arent players selling teak logs? Or are they? In general such materials are stockpiled, not sold. I guess for newer players its profitable to sell their doubloon for lots of reals, cause they dont own 500k reals from prepatch. Or when you dont need doubloon stuff, cause youre just using 5th rates nevertheless, you would probably sell them. What price are those doubloons selling for?

Players cant print them. Npcs can.

Sure it would be nice to have this option in case you really care about your nation or your cargo is super important. But then dumping cargo needs to be a decision you really need to think about. Like in RL, where you wouldnt have been treated very friendly after dumping enemy treasure. Even then it might not work, when the chance of no reward is still high enough to scare off the majority of players. We dont care about our lifes, thats the issue. It would be cool though if we did. You could make cargo dumping work, as well as surrendering in a very realistic way. If someone surrenders you could let the player decide to kill him or not, depending on the person, his previous actions, and how moral you want to be. Moral decisions that would have concequences and would define who you are, instead of just choosing pirates to be the bad guy. Just slaughter everyone, and you are likely to get killed aswell.

Mechanics have to work, and nobody would ever design a game that lets players fool around with each other. Because this is simply not fun. Sure it might be fun for someone to piss off someone else by dumping the cargo. But when every trader/ship would just dump its cargo to piss off the enemy, players would just stop hunting traders/players for their cargo. No satisfaction anymore for him, less gameplay options for the others.

Why do you need to place loot in cargo to achieve this? When you want randomness in loot, you can do it either way. Sure its realistic to loot the cargo. But realism isnt focussed on anywhere else. Why here, at huge quality of life cost for the player, and tribunal effort for you? Whats the reasoning behind it besides realism?

And sailors would probably care about there lifes much more than about cargo they dont even own. But its hard to represent this somehow in game. An idea could be to give your sailors a chance to protest. So your ship could just stop and cargo dumping fails. But still you would push that button every single time after the point of no escape is reached... Same, you would just push that button every single time you can.

So you could steal your allies loot, and when he attacks after 3 warnings you can sink and loot him aswell? There might be no need for actual enemies anymore then.

How are you rewarded as the merchant by dumping your cargo? For you its no difference, youre loosing the cargo so or so. A mechanics that just frustrates other players and does nothing else, is very bad game design. A mechanic that players use every single time in a certain situation without thinking, is bad game design. If they want this in the game, dumping cargo should have a serious drawback, so it wouldnt happen very often and players would need to actually make decisions. Something like reduced reputation, if there was reputation. Or reduced crew capacity for the next 24 hours, but traders probably wouldnt care. I dont think there are good ways to balance this, so it should be removed. You could slow it down extremely so players would atleast need to evaluate the point of no escape right, but they would still use it every single time. I think it should float inside the instance then, because it makes no sense that you need to leave the instance to loot what the trader just dumped right infront of you. But thats a good idea, making the hunter choose between ship and cargo, and the trader needs to dump early enough. If he doesnt though the chase just takes much longer.